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Transversing the Circuit of Dispossession
It is not that what is past casts lights on what is present, or what is present its light
on what is past, rather, image is that wherein what have been comes together in
a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics
at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely tempo-
ral, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been and the now is dialectical: not
temporal in nature but figural [bildlich]. Only dialectical images are genuine—that
is, not archaic—images. The image that is read—which is to say, the image in the
now of its recognizability—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous
moment on which all reading is founded.
—Walter Benjamin1
The Eighteenth Century, vol. 55, nos. 2–3 Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.
ing of the figural as a critical historical device. That is, it produces a drawing
of the circuit of dispossession, in which the tagging of Europe as a point of
dispossession within this circuit interrupts the linear causality characterizing
modern European versions of necessity.3 By “necessity” I mean to reference a
Eurocentric lexicon that has conditioned some accounts of the onset of capital
accumulation in the early modern period. For instance, a notion of necessity
informs the conceptions of the material, the natural, and the scientific which
underlie Karl Marx’s description of the conditions of production—relations of
production, instruments of production, contract [wage] labor, etc.—necessary
for capitalist production (and accumulation of capital) to take place. Necessity,
in other words, becomes a kind of epistemological lock that still troubles histor-
ical materialist theorizing because it prevents the kind of theoretical revolution
that would show how each of these points (Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe)
plays a role in yesterday’s and today’s moments of capital accumulation/dis-
possession which now form global capital.
In describing the special issue, Jordana Rosenberg and Chi-ming Yang re-
mind readers why an engagement with accumulation that simultaneously
addresses enclosure and conquest is a necessary project. For one thing, their
mudding of the historical materialist arsenal is animated by the same desire
as Marx’s, Friedrich Engels’s, Benjamin’s, and Antonio Gramsci’s, to name a
few, which is, “to recover the defiant underside of these economic formations
[dispossession and enclosure]: the history and aesthetics of resistance.” My
commentary to this special issue is animated by the same desire, which is to
break the circuit of dispossession and to design mechanisms for redressing the
total value expropriated through the violent appropriation of the productive
capacity of enslaved workers and colonized lands. Here I take this opportunity
to speculate about the kind of shift in thinking that would allow a radicaliza-
tion of the historical materialist framework. In particular, I am animated by
the editors’ statement regarding the boundaries of capital and how the articles
assembled here muddy conceptual and geographic lines of separation, which
guide and are reproduced in every attempt to establish what is proper.4 For a
radical reconsideration of these boundaries—a reinterpretation of the circuit of
dispossession and its points of entry—that privileges the aesthetic is key if we
are to trace the dis/continuities between today’s and earlier practices of resis-
tance. Both tasks, we must not forget, are necessary if we are to design practices
that better disrupt the deployment of State-Capital power in the global present.
A radical blow that would render the tools of historical materialism more
effective in a postcolonial/racial critique of capitalism requires a simultane-
ous confrontation with extant notions of time and space. As we know, capital-
ism’s difference—and the juridical, ethical, and aesthetic forms accompanying
it—relies on strict formulations of time—past-present-future.5 This, of course,
poses a challenge to the radical project of refashioning the premises and pre-
suppositions of existing critical tools—such as that of historical materialism’s—
especially when, as in the case of this special issue, the project combines an
historical take (a look back in time) with the project of excavating the aesthetic
archive for specimens of resistance.
How the editors and authors meet this challenge, I think, is an example of the
kind of shift in thinking—that is, the doing away with linear narratives of time
and space as the basis of knowing and doing—that will provide us the tools for
responding to the current modes of deployment of State-Capital power. What
I find in this special issue is an exercise in the decentering of the causal, linear
framing of temporality that characterizes many historical accounts. Read as a
whole, the issue’s aesthetic effect and critical contribution is captured by Benja-
min’s definition of the image as “that wherein what have been comes together
in a flash with the now to form a constellation, [that is], image is dialectics at a
standstill,” quoted above in my epigraph. When distinguishing between past
and present (and the related notion of progression) and “what has been” and
“now” Benjamin indicates a possible radical engagement with the pervasive
accounts (G. W. F. Hegel’s and Marx’s) of the “historical.” In his account, the
“past” or the “earlier,” which he terms “what-has-been,” remains in a relation
with the “now,” which he represents as form (a “constellation”) and not as line
(an “arrow”). There is much to be explored here. Due to the limits of this com-
mentary, I will propose that we consider this relationship that is presented as an
image produced in/by language, and which is given instantaneously/immedi-
ately (“in a flash”), as a material analytical device.6 What I find in this special
issue is precisely that: the circuit of dispossession is not presented as a teleology
or an eschatology but as a figure (an assemblage of points of entry), in which
every and each geographical element is present in every other. This emerges be-
cause each article contributes a literary or historical figure to assemble in a flash
the circuit of dispossession, in such a way that disrupts the linear (causal) read-
ing of global movements of capital as beginning, ending, and being directed by
post-Enlightenment Europe.
How it is done is an effect of a deployment of space—one with Europe en-
tered in the middle of the circuit—in which there is a collapsing of the distances
between each point of entry in the circuit of dispossession. The six articles in
this special issue identify a number of literary figurations of the dispossessed
that are poised variously in between mercantile and industrial capital—the
Rogue, the Slave, the Carib, the Lascar, and the Pauper. These same figures
have been later dissolved in historical materialist descriptions of the workings
of capital, in which wage labor remains the proper figure of the dispossessed by
proper capital. How can language effect a circuit without a line? One possibility
is through naming itself, and the relationship it has with self-representation,
in particular given how Europe has relied on naming (through its categories
of knowledge) to produce its moral and intellectual difference. Rogue, Slave,
Carib, Lascar, and Pauper are names for economic figures that belie their geo-
graphic provenance while at the same time hide how they have participated in
sold and become property of the slave owner—becoming the site of class strug-
gle, as they moved along maritime lines of dispossession. Not surprisingly, in
the life-and-death struggle aboard the slave ship, resistance could only entail
rendering the body unavailable to be subjected to extraction of total value.
When read as a unit, these analyses crash the prevailing understandings of
the economic circuit of dispossession with an ethical circuit of dispossession that
correlates racial formations of colonial subjects with European accumulation. No
longer do Colonist, Carib, Rogue, Lascar, Slave, and Pauper only acquire moral
value (as elements of differentiation) through the particular ways in which they
are said to differ from Europeans. Rather, each of these figures is directly de-
ployed to produce a transversal reading that exposes in the Pauper (the subaltern
economic subject produced by enclosure) how colonial space frames the Euro-
pean conditions for the emergence of the relations between wage labor and capi-
tal. The social relations of production that are thought to distinguish capitalism
from any other form of production that preceded or coincided with it are thus
far from innately European. More importantly, however, what this special issue
shows is that these namings of the dispossessed require a displacing of Europe
onto colonial sites, including ships. Further, because the consistent theme is dis-
possession, Europe enters these analysis as the site of enclosure, the land appro-
priation that dis/places Europe onto colonial spaces, and also the one that made
wage labor available to both mercantile/colonial and industrial capital.7
Easily, transversality could be attributed to the nature of the critical work
here, that is, in the fact that it consists in an engagement with the “what-has-
been” of capital that explores its aesthetic renderings. However I find that trans-
versality is an aesthetic effect of the special issue itself—that is, the collection of
essays as a whole produces an image, that of a crushed and mangled circuit
of dispossession. Mangling, through establishing transversal correspondences
usually erased by clear-cut analytical categories, here exposes capital accumu-
lation as contingent upon an ethical circuit of dispossession, which is guided
by the presumption that self-determination distinguishes the proper (modern/
European/white/male) legal, economic, and moral subject.
Each article challenges us to consider how the exploited economic subject
of historical materialism, namely the wage laborer, is a product of both enclo-
sure and conquest, as many of the eighteenth-century European dispossessed
would, either by design or by force, find themselves servants, deported crimi-
nals, or small colonists in the Americas or in the East Indies. More importantly,
what I find in the aesthetic renderings of the Rogue, the Slave, the Carib, the
Lascar, and the Pauper (whether sympathetic or not) in this special issue is
an invitation to consider whether and how each of the geographical locations
referred by these figures transverse in the assemblage of wage labor.8 As I have
elsewhere argued, the production of the subject of economic exploitation also
required the production of moral subjects which, though involved in the eco-
nomic circuit of dispossession, would be eliminated from the history of capital
because of the institutional and analytical separation between the three do-
mains of the political, namely the ethical, juridical, and the economic.9 The lit-
erary pieces discussed in this special issue (more importantly, how the authors
have chosen to read them) indicate the centrality of the ethical in the writing
of European difference—a centrality that can be appreciated by how much ef-
fort seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophers put into their framing
of the subject of universal reason—which would later become the basis for the
naturalization of the direction of the circuit of dispossession that to this day
reproduces the geographic, conceptual, and racial spaces of global capital.
NOTES
1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, 2002), 463.
2. For an elaboration of this argument, see Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira
da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession & Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—
Introduction,” American Quarterly 63, no. 3 (September 2012), 361–85; and Silva, Notes
Towards the End of Time (London, 2014).
3. The prevalence of linear causality in social scientific thought may be attributed to
how Immanuel Kant borrowed classical physics’s rendering of efficient causality when
describing the conditions of possibility of knowing with certainty before and beyond ex-
perience. See Critique of Pure Reason [1787] (Cambridge, 1999), where he proposes a notion
of necessity as an attribute of judgment.
4. I cannot possibly summarize the various debates—in particular in the 1970s—
regarding the limits of capital, both geographically (for instance, in regards to whether
and how capitalism has or would develop outside Europe) and conceptually (in terms of
how non-capitalist relations of production participate in the corpus of capitalism). Yang
and Rosenberg’s introduction includes some references to this debate. It is also revisited
in Jairus Banaji’s Theory as History (Leiden, 2010).
5. See for example the mapping of time by John Ellis McTaggart, “The Unreality of
Time,” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy 17 (1908): 456–73.
6. Here I am thinking of how in artistic practice, the form is an arrangement of materi-
als and not the meaning it has in Kant’s philosophy, for instance.
7. Silvia Federici performs a similar move in Caliban and the Witch (Brooklyn, 2004).
8. Geography here does not and should not only figure as sites where different kinds
of workers were (and still are) over-exploited, which could become a very important and
necessary point of departure for a critique of existing theses of accumulation, and the
distinction that renders it only the effect of one particular relation of production, that be-
tween capital and slave labor. More interesting, I think, at this point at least, would be to
spend a bit more time with transversality to consider how the architectures of mercantile,
industrial, and now global capital create and need more than different temporalities (see,
for example, Massimiliano Tomba, Marx’s Temporalities [Leiden, 2013]). My point here is
that they need (and for that reason produce and reproduce) spatialities, which are both
geographic and conceptual. Elsewhere I have argued that the racial has been deployed
to re-produce ontologically these spatialities, by producing affectable persons and places
(see Toward a Global Idea of Race [Minneapolis, 2007])—and that the racial is now inscribed
in the very fabric of the global space. From this acknowledged effect of the racial (and the
analytics of raciality) it is possible to trace back—to the eighteenth century and before—
and find, in the transversality unearthed by this special issue, the various relations of
production upon which capital relies for its survival (see also Banaji).
9. See Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.